Traveling with Dad was an adventure, but you never knew when that adventure might take place. Once, on a family trip out West (via station wagon from Michigan), he spent a very long time paying at the gas station. (That wasn't too unusual; he loved learning about people and would collect stories at every stop.) When he came out, he had found a ghost town for us to visit. We drove up into dusty hills and found a few buildings, including the house where a scene from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had been shot.
Sometimes the adventure was waiting for him to finish taking his photos. Way before digital, he would take zillions of pictures of everything. His photo case with all the lenses weighed a ton, and his suitcase was filled with rolls of film. He'd stop walking for just the right shot(s). The rest of the family finally would give up and just keep walking. A few minutes later, he'd trot up. His slide shows were always worth it.
His photos were creative and his viewpoint, too. We would hike a lot as a family, and he always found faces in trees, or atypical rock formations. He'd wonder how things got to be that way. He said that as a boy he learned that Indians walked with their feet perfectly straight in front of them because, if you walked for long distances, it was more efficient. I remember him exasperated seeing a tree grow out from a rock canyon wall when he couldn't even get them to grow when watered and fertilized at home.
He could find interest in the mundane. On long road trips, when he switched lanes, he'd try to do it without hitting any of the reflectors embedded in the road. He'd decypher patterns in the traffic. For example, he might count drivers with facial hair to see if more than half had it, or whether more cars were blue than green. The world was always interesting to him, and he made it more interesting for me.
